Purpose:
The change/no-change procedure (J. E. Sussman & A. E. Carney, 1989), which assesses speech discrimination, has been used under the assumption that the number of stimulus presentations does not influence performance. Motivated by the tenets of the multiple looks hypothesis (N. F. Viemeister & G. H. Wakefield, 1991), work by R. F. Holt and A. E. Carney (2005) called this assumption into question (at least for adults): Nonsense syllable discrimination improved with more stimulus presentations. This study investigates the nature of developmental differences and the effects of multiple stimulus presentations in the change/no-change procedure.

Method:
Thirty normal-hearing children, ages 4.0–5.9 years, were tested on 3 consonant–vowel contrasts at various signal-to-noise ratios using combinations of 2 and 4 standard and comparison stimulus repetitions.

Results:
Although performance fell below that which is predicted by the multiple looks hypothesis in most conditions, discrimination was enhanced with more stimulus repetitions for 1 speech contrast. The relative influence of standard and comparison stimulus repetitions varied across the speech contrasts in a manner different from that of adults.

This research was supported by National Research Service Award F31 DC05919 (predoctoral fellowship) from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and by the 2002 Student Research Grant in Audiology from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation. Preliminary findings were presented at the 2002 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Annual Convention (Atlanta, GA) and at the 2004 Acoustical Society of America Annual Meeting (New York, NY). We thank Edward Carney for his expertise in computer programming and data analysis; Benjamin Munson for his assistance in synthesizing the stimuli; Kimberly Krambeck for assistance in portions of the data collection; Karlind Moller, Peggy Nelson, Robert Schlauch, and Neal Viemeister for their valuable insights on this project; and Judith Gierut for her valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

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